Heritage Tourism in Southeast Asia

Edited by Michael Hitchcock, Victor T. King and Michael Parnwell

2010, 322 pp, 15x23 cm.

• First book to examine heritage tourism across the Southeast Asian region and from different disciplinary perspectives.
• Explores both cultural and natural heritage management pressures and responses.
• Emphasizes how local people perceive national and world heritage sites, and how they are affected by heritage management.

This is the first book to examine heritage tourism across the Southeast Asian region and from different disciplinary perspectives. With material that is new and topical, it makes an important contribution to the fields of tourism studies, cultural studies, development and planning studies, and beyond.

Set against a backdrop of the demands, motivations and impacts of heritage tourism, the volume focuses on disputes and conflicts over what heritage is, what it means, and how it has been presented, re-presented, developed and protected. It examines the different actors involved in encounters and contestation, drawing on issues of identity construction and negotiation, and requiring the contextualization of heritage in national and global processes of identity formation and transformation. Among the questions touched upon are the ownership of heritage, its appropriate use, access to it versus conservation needs, heritage as a commodity, as entertainment and as an educational medium, and the interpretation and representation of heritage forms.

The volume is more than a tourism study and of interest beyond the immediate field of tourism studies, however. It also provides ample data about the various governmental institutions and international agencies, and about how their decisions are made. Moreover, with conclusions based on credible methodologies and data, this is a key resource for both academic researchers and governmental agencies.

Victor T. (Terry) King is an expert in the fields of sociology and anthropology in South East Asia studies. Professor King has been widely involved in the programs of various institutes such as the University of Hull and the University of Leeds.  He has also been associated with the British Institute in South-East Asia, and the Association of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom (ASEASUK). Professor King is current working on various new book projects, including a companion volume to his recently published The Sociology of Southeast Asia: Transformations in a Developing Region' (NIAS Press/University of Hawai'i Press, 2008).

Mike Parnwell is a Geographer who over the last quarter-century has specialised on the development process in Southeast Asia and its many problems and outcomes. His PhD examined the then fairly recently theorised phenomenon of 'return migration', using northeast Thailand as a case study. From there his interests have blossomed to include many facets of development—tourism, rural change, urbanisation, deforestation, rural industrialisation, sustainability—and also many countries of the region and beyond—Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and China. His recent research has looked at the emerging phenomenon of 'localism' in Thailand, which he has combined with collaborative research on the interface of Buddhism and development, looking at the work of 'development monks' in the northeast. He is presently working on a wider project on 'alternative visions of development' in the Southeast Asian context.